ROBERT KWEKU ATTA GARDINER

Background

GARDINER, Robert Kweku Atta was born on September 29, 1914 in Kumasi. Son of Phillip H. D. Gardiner and Nancy T. Ferguson.

Education

Educated at Fourah Bay College, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he got an economics BA in 1941, and at New College, Oxford.

Career

He started his career as a lecturer in Economics at Eourah Bay from 1943 to 1946. He then became area specialist of the UN Trusteeship Department from 1947 to 1949 and Director of the Department of Extra Mural Studies at Ibadan, Nigeria from 1949 to 1953. He went on to become Director of the Social Welfare and Community Development in Ghana (1953-5), chairman of the Kumasi College of Technology Council (1954-8), Permanent Secretary in the Housing Ministry (1955-7) and Establishment Secretary and Head of the Civil Service (1957-9).

He became chairman of the Commonwealth Foundation in 1969.

In 1971 he threw his full weight behind the ECA project to build a Trans-African highway between Mombasa and Lagos.

Works

• Other Work

  • A World of Peoples, 1965. Co-author: The Development of Social Administration, 1959.

Politics

Shortly after the formation of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, he became its deputy executive secretary. He was on the threshold of an mternational administrator's career and soon proved his patient and subtle diplomacy in the Congo, where he was the officer in charge of the United Nations operations from 1962 to 1963 before becoming executive secretary for the Economic Commission for Africa. He has remained in that post since, though he has also been a distinguished lecturer from the time he made his mark when he became a Reith lecturer in 1965.

Membership

International Honorary Committee, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. Society for International Development. Scientific Council, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Institution.

International Institute, Institution for Tropical Agr. International Foundation Humanum. International Economic Association.

Personality

A warm, emotional and intensely human father-figure, whose tolerance and idealism are expressed with a gentle persuasiveness which seems almost out of place in today’s bustling and violent world. A writer, lecturer, member of innumerable professional societies, awarded a host of honorary degrees, he was singled out by Conor Cruise O’Brien as the most committed and concerned UN official, when he headed the UN Mission in the Congo. For O’Brien, the appreciation of Gardiner’s “profound political emotions at work” was the best memory he took away from the tortured country.

Interests

• Golf, reading, walking, music.

Connections

Married Linda Charlotte Edwards in 1942.

Father:

Phillip H. D. Gardiner

Mother:

Nancy T. Ferguson

Spouse:

Linda Charlotte Edwards